Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode we're going to talk about creating some distance from the mental storyline that can be so dominating in our experience.

More to come on that in a moment, first let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, today's going to be a simple strategy to use when you find yourself overly identified with the storyline moving through your mind.

If you listen to this podcast, I probably don't have to go too deep into the storyline of your mind.

What I mean by that is just the thoughts that arise in our mind that tell us something about ourselves, about a situation, about what we perceive to be some fundamental truth about the world or whatever is happening to us.

When we're not aware of that storyline, we take it as fact and we get consumed by it, it triggers different emotions, causes us to repeat certain patterns, and that whole process is in a way mindfulness 101.

And we learn different strategies to work with kind of unhinging ourselves from that strong identification with that storyline.

Meditation practice helps with this, just becoming more aware of those thoughts as they arise over and over and over again, which is essentially a huge aspect of meditation.

That helps unhook us from the over-identification with those thoughts.

And today I've just shared something, a simple thing that you can reframe in your own mind when you find that happening that should also aid in that process.

So let's say you take a break, you're working really hard, you're a bit of an A type personality, and you actually give yourself some space to not do anything.

And as you're sitting on the couch, you're going for a walk, not in your achievement mode, you notice a thought come up in your mind that says, this is weak.

Right, like some version of I am weak, but let's just say this is weak. Right, that this is weak, that thought is like a declarative statement.

It's spoken as if it's truth, and if we don't catch it, it can continue to reinforce as a truth for us.

And it can create a complicated relationship to taking rest, taking a break, it can cause us to exhaust ourselves, get caught up and burn out.

So a simple thing in that moment, just to reduce some of the emotional charge and the identification with that, is you switch, this is weak to, I have a story that this is weak.

This is weak to, I have a story that this is weak.

What that's doing is it's just taking you back another layer of metacognition, stepping back from the actual thought, and recognizing, okay, there's this, and this is a story.

It's not necessarily true, it's something that my mind is saying right now, if I don't challenge it, if I'm not aware of it, or even if I am aware of it, but don't challenge it, then it's most likely going to continue in my whole system as some fact.

And so by just saying, oh, I have a story that this is weak, you're grounding yourself in the awareness of that thought, rather than the thought itself.

This is weak versus I have a story that this is weak.

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